How to Optimize Your Site for Phone Calls

A lot of time passed since my post on calls-to-action but I am still getting comments and requests from people who are willing to get their site visitors to act. One of the recent comments was about optimizing your site for phone calls: how to place your company number to start getting calls.

I don’t know any extraordinary hacks (if you do, please share) but here’s what I know about why and how to make your telephone number visible:

Do you actually need a phone number on your site?

Usability:

A phone number is an effective way to get your visitors’ instant feedback (view the number of calls you get daily as an indicator of the website usability especially after the redesign or some tweaking);

A prominent phone number on a website builds the trust and confidence (the Internet is impersonal enough: adding some evidence that there are real people out there – like the physical address and the phone number) makes people feel more comfortable). The telephone number offers an additional, convenient way to order, but most importantly it implies that a live person is ready to assist.

Source: e-tailing.com

SEO:

A telephone number might be one of the on-page trust identifiers. One of the facts supporting this theory for example is that one of the old Yahoo criteria for listing was a valid phone number on the site contact page. (Some editors would even try the number to make sure it is legit);

Stick to the easily recognized formats:

A U.S. phone number separates the area code, exchange, and number into three fields. Parentheses surround the area code field, and a dash separates the exchange and number fields. Thus the correct way to format a US phone number to make sure the US-based visitor instantly recognizes the format is:

Helpful tip: if you are wondering about your country standard, try checking a local search engines to see which format they are sticking to. This local search engine is good option for Canadians, for example.

Add phone numbers when you list your businesses in local directories

Some local directories allow (and encourage) you to add your phone number when requesting being listed there. That increases direct no-click conversions and send quality and trust signals to both people and search bots.

Mind the placement:

There are traditional (obvious) placements of your company phone number:

Contact page;

Help page;

About-us page, and the like.

What should be noted here is that the best thing you can do to make sure your visitor is going to like you and your company from the very start is to make sure the phone number is easy to find. Often the owners seem to do their best to avoid the phone calls: look at this example (the phone number can only be found after the second click):

Contextual phone numbers

Some really essential steps in the buying process may require additional help or just re-inforce the feeling of confidence:

Order page (Is there actually a person behind the site?);

Checkout process (Is the site secure enough to entrust it with my billing details?);

Service description (Are there any custom solution to fit my needs?); etc

Increased visibility:

It often makes sense to make the phone number visible sitewide (in the head banner for example).

Adding the phone number in the title tag (as well as meta description) might also make sense (both FireFox and IE will make the phone numbers clickable within the search results to make the listing stand out and thus more clicked ):

25 Responses to “How to Optimize Your Site for Phone Calls”

It is the best practice to place phone numbers in right place, people who really want to contact you must search for the phone number to contact immediately, but how to make it possible for being in the office for the whole 24 hours near the phone, i think for developing and small firms it is harder to track the calls..

interesting topic – since recession kicked in we’ve been doing everything we can to make it really easy for customers to speak to us even if it costs a little more. We receive 7k calls a day here. Best text for converting and call to action for us has been ‘FREE customer support 0800 xxx’ and ‘FREE reservation hotline 0800 xxx’ we’ve also dynamically included the opening hours in a hover e.g. if its 1am in the morning the hover will say we’re open again from 8am – and we do of course have phone numbers on each stage of the booking process. re: post above for mobile phone – don’t forget iPhones now identify phone numbers on sites and make them clickable.

I think that placement is a big key when trying to optimize for phone calls, not so much in the search engine value but in the ability to get it noticed. I think keeping the number above the fold, in a large enough font size, and in prominent placement can really help someone who is wanted to get more phone calls.

I believe a phone number should be placed in the upper right side of the header on a Web site. It should be in large, bold type. Also, I think small firms with only 1-4 employees, for example, should outsource to a company that offers inbound call center services. It could be difficult for a small company to handle a large number of telephone and e-mail inquiries.

I guess it depends on what type of service or product your are selling. But if you are focused on a local market, a local number actually works better, based upon my experience. Of course nationally, you have to go with the toll free number.

An interesting post. Its also a good idea to keep your phone number as a text rather than a graphic, this will make it more accessible to search engines. Its also important to make your contact phone number easy to find, putting predominantly in the header of page is a good idea.

I agree that a phone number on a website improves the trust relationship between the customer and the company and could actually improve sales. The major downside is that you always have to have someone “man” the phones, or use an answerphone but I wouldn’t recommend this. I’ve shopped on many retail websites before in frustration that I am unable to find a phone number to call because of a problem I have experienced. It does frustrate people when companies do this but I guess they can only sell cheap products if they keep their operating costs low.

This is a great post and I have been bleating on about how important telephone call data is for internet marketing.
This inspired me to work out, then write a paper on how to track telephone call data in Google Analytics.http://www.freshegg.com/pdf/CallTrackID_White_Paper_Fresh_Egg.pdf. You could use the same principle to test where placing telephone numbers is most effective.

I am satisfied by your thinking like phone no. place in header, title and meta tags. That will be so useful for optimization.
But not sure, how search engine treat this and what search results we have in the Google searching? I think it will be cool.

Totally agree – this is quite an old post but it’s still spot on interestingly enough. In fact it’s probably even more relevant now with the amout of local results displacing organic results for lots of user searches.